Sun's "disappointing" fiscal third quarter results, which reported it lost $34 million, or 4 cents per share, in the three months ending March 30, spurred Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz to answer a few questions regarding the company's health and status.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will now offer the OpenSolaris Operating System to its customers as well as give users access to MySQL premium technical support. Amazon EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud, allowing customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that they actually use.

Less is more or better, at least, in the eyes of RedMonk analyst James Governor. The "less" he blogs about is the .5 percent decline in Sun's revenue reported for the company's fiscal third quarter, which ended March 30th. On the other hand, he notes, Microsoft suffered a 24 percent decline in revenue for the quarter.

Over the past couple of months, Sun had been promoting the fact that its was nearing a milestone - certifying a half a million professionals - and wanted to honor the Sun Certified Professional who helped the company reach that mark with gifts. Well, the milestone has been met and the individual awarded.

System News posts items of interest for Sun users on a regular basis on the System News For Sun Users blog. A quick recap of posts for the last week includes: Developers Offered Free Hosting on OpenSocial Platform, New Releases Freely Available to Download, OpenSolaris dot Org and dot Com, Sun Third Party System Management Integrations, Does the Solaris OS Really Cost Less Than Linux and Neil Young to Help Open JavaOne Conference.

The new NetBeans IDE 6.1 supports a wide range of open source scripting technologies, offers improved performance and extends language support beyond Java technology through a rich set of features for C/C++, JavaScript and the Ruby language, including Ruby on Rails. Another new arrival is the NetBeans IDE Early Access for PHP that offers developers intelligent editing features.

Sun and Liferay, Inc. are developing a common, open source, standards-based Web presentation platform under the Sun/Liferay Initiative that will combine technologies from both companies to enhance and maintain web aggregation and presentation technologies. Liferay Portal 5 and Sun's Project Web Synergy are the first version of the new product families resulting from this initiative.

In his two-part blog debunking myths about OSS, enterprise architect Mike Kavis takes on several common misconceptions about open source software, conceding at the outset that he sees room in the grand scheme of things for proprietary software as well. "The trick is to know when to use the right tool for the right job," he writes.

Like so much else of Sun's product line, the company is open sourcing the hardware and operating system for its Sun Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT). In an interview with Arshan Poursohi, staff researcher at the Sun SPOT lab, Mary Grush of Campus Technology explores some of the implications of this further opening of Sun technology. Sun SPOT is a sensor networking product based on Java technology. Grush was particularly interested in how higher education institutions can incorporate Sun SPOTs in research and instruction.

VirtualBox 1.6.0 now offers users Mac OS X and Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) host platform support, new high performance virtual devices, improved scalability and Web Services. This latest version of the free virtualization framework includes a Web Service API, a SATA hard-disk controller (AHCI) and guest system extensions for Solaris OS.

The recent release of the Solaris 10 Operating System 5/08 (Solaris OS), with its enhancements to Kerberos, has prompted bloggers and others [19592] to write on the subject. This blog outlines the most significant new Kerberos features. In addition to these new features, listed below, the 05/08 release includes a number of bug fixes as well.

Joerg Moellenkamp has created an excellent series of tutorials on the "Less Known Features of Solaris." His most recent set of tutorials covers Point-in-time copy with AVS, which he points out "are a rather unusual feature for small installations, but they are absolutely essential for many enterprise customers. And when you really think about it, there are many usecases even for small installations."

One of the first clarifications Fahmida Y. Rashid provides in the examination written for ChannelWeb of MySQL under the Sun umbrella is that there is nothing proprietary in Sun's acquisition of the database vendor. The decision to differentiate between MySQL Community and MySQL Enterprise, the author writes, came well before the acquisition.

Taylor Allis of Sun's Market Strategy & Intelligence unit concedes that his initial skepticism about open storage was misplaced. The combination of open source software with industry-standard hardware for the purpose of creating enterprise-class storage systems is a good idea after all, he now says.

Dianne McAdam of The Clipper Group jousts against the disk proponents who argue that tape is dead, dispelling nine myths on the subject in the course of her argument. Her conclusion? Tape is far from dead and remains a strong contender for space in the data center.

Sun has made yet more code available to the open source community. This time it involves Honeycomb, the fixed-content object storage software of the StorageTek 5800, as reported by Leslie T. O'Neill. Developers can download the binary code from Sun.com and run a complete implementation on their own server or even a laptop.

During the last quarter (Jan 08, Feb 08. Mar 08), the web site for this newsletter had 140k unique visitors who viewed 312k pages. (For the past 12 months: 416k visitors and 1.0 million page views.)

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 122 Issue 5, were: